Stone Spring Part 45

Bark led the Pretani charge across the floor of the Bay Land, heading straight for the heap of flint at the foot of the eastern barrage. When they got the chance they smashed down houses and stands on which hides cured and fish dried, and kicked over hearths to start fires. In places the Etxelur folk and their allies stood and fought, and blood yells and screams echoed across the bowl of a landscape. But mostly the Etxelur folk jabbed, fell away and scattered, to regroup further back.

Hollow was hot and already out of breath. He was a trader, not a fighter. But he seemed determined to keep up with the rest. 'Not far now. We're cutting through this Etxelur rabble like a flint knife through a calf's s.c.r.o.t.u.m.'

Bark wished he had somebody more experienced with him; he wished he was at Shade's side. 'It's too easy.'

'What?'

'It's too easy! These Etxelur folk are barely putting up a fight at all.'

'They're cowards.'

'No! Think, man. Where are the children? Where are the sick, the lame, the old? They've been moved out of our way, is where they are.'

Hollow shook his head, panting as they jogged across the heavy ground. 'You're too suspicious. Just because it's easier than you thought doesn't make it any the less glorious. We're driving across this unnatural land just as tonight you'll be driving your manhood between the thighs of some Etxelur virgin - you mark my words.'

It was all a trap, Bark thought. The more he considered it, the more certain he became. But there was no point talking to Hollow about it, for the man's head was full of greed for the flint.

And besides, there was nothing he could do about it now. Many of his men had fallen already, and lay broken or dead across the ground behind the advance. Those who survived and could still fight had the sniff of victory, as did Hollow, and were chasing down the scattered bands of Etxelur fighters. Their blood was up. Trap or not, all they could do was fight, or die.

They were almost on the flint stockpile. The sea wall towered above them, its face of Pretani stone many times the height of a warrior. They had been drawn here right across the expanse of the Bay Land, Bark saw. If the flint was bait, it had worked well.

Hollow ran to the flint, picking up rattling armfuls of nodules. 'Look at this stuff. Look at it! Enough to last a lifetime, a generation, more! Now the whole world will tremble before the singing blades of the Pretani.'

Some of the warriors joined him. They stood panting beside the flints, and fingered the nodules, or looked up at the great wall, or back the way they had come, uncertain. Some looked at Bark, hoping for guidance. What now? But he had no answers.

And there was a groan, like the branch of a giant tree straining in the wind. A sc.r.a.pe of stone on stone. The men looked bewildered, alarmed. Even Hollow fell silent.

The noise had come from overhead.

Bark looked up. He saw pale faces looking down at him, and glimpsed long, stripped branches being rammed into place and used as levers. And he saw the upper section of the wall tipping over, huge blocks of Pretani sandstone folding grandly. Water gushed into the air behind the blocks, breaking up into droplets, like rain.

Hollow screamed, high-pitched, like a trapped deer. The warriors, yelling, jostled to get away from the wall. Bark was knocked to the ground, face down. And he heard a yell, a single savage word in the Etxelur tongue. Raising his head he saw Etxelur folk on the plain, boiling up out of nowhere, advancing with their stabbing spears to trap the fleeing Pretani.

Above him the vast blocks fell slowly, as if they were thistle-down, not stone, and sea water splashed his face. In the end, the block that came for him filled the sky.

84.

Watching from the midden beach, Ana saw a handful of Pretani break out of the melee by the causeway's abutment, and come running onto the island.

'Here they come,' said Kirike.

Ana took his hand. 'Walk with me. We'll go out along the ocean d.y.k.e.'

Kirike was reluctant. 'We'll be trapped out there. You go. I'll stay and fight them off.' He was scared, Ana saw, scared to his bones. He believed he was going to die. Yet he was prepared to stand to try to save her.

'No,' she said firmly. 'Stay beside me. I'm still in charge.' She pulled at his hand until he followed her.

The d.y.k.es pushed out into the ocean towards the submerged Mothers' Door. Their abutments were covered in heaps of unused rock and timber. Ana picked her way through this to the left-hand d.y.k.e, and they walked out along its surface, until the d.y.k.e grew too narrow and ragged for them to go further safely. Looking out from here, you could see the rows of posts driven into the seabed that would become the foundation of the d.y.k.e.

And here, Ana decided, in the arms of the ocean she had been trying to tame ever since the Great Sea, she would make her stand. She gripped Kirike's hand, and they turned to face the sh.o.r.e.

There were five, six, seven Pretani - all that was left of the mob that had come here from their wooded country, or at least this half of them, while the rest had got bogged down in the Bay Land. The Etxelur defenders weren't far behind.

When the Pretani leader saw that Ana and Kirike had gone out alone onto the d.y.k.e, he snapped quick words to his followers. And then he and one other walked cautiously out onto the d.y.k.e, following the footsteps of Ana and Kirike, both glancing down nervously at the lapping sea. Ana knew immediately who they were - and saw that the rumours about who was really behind this attack had been correct.

When her own defenders came running along the beach, the remaining Pretani turned to face them, spears raised. Ana raised both her hands, palms out. Wait. Wait. The Etxelur folk were clearly uncertain, but they slowed to a halt, some way short of the Pretani band.

The two warriors on the d.y.k.e saw this. A woman's voice called, in fluent Etxelur speak, 'Good, Ana. No need for anybody else to die today.'

'n.o.body but us?' Ana called back.

'As long as it ends here,' called the other, a stocky man. 'One way or another.'

'Oh, it will,' Ana said. 'I promise you that.'

They stopped only ten or fifteen paces short of Kirike and Ana. The man had thick black hair, the woman pale red like Ana's though greying, and both had their hair pulled back and tied in the Pretani style. Both of them had been fighting, hard; the man had a gashed shoulder, and the woman was splashed with blood, perhaps not her own, gore smeared over her face and hands and tunic.

Kirike stared. 'Who are they?'

The man called, 'My name is Shade. I speak for the Pretani.'

And the woman said, 'You are Kirike. You have my father's name, the name I gave you. I am not Pretani. I am of Etxelur blood. My name is Zesi. I am the daughter of Kirike, and sister of Ana. Kirike, I am your mother. And this man, the Root of the Pretani - this is your father.'

'I never saw you before.'

'Not since you were too small to remember - no. You were taken away from me.'

Kirike just stared, apparently speechless.

Shade faced Ana. There was little left of the Shade Ana remembered, little of that dreamy boy in this tough, tired, competent-looking man.

'I heard you were pregnant,' he called. 'By Jurgi?'

'Yes.'

He smiled. 'A good man. I had plans to make him my own priest.'

'You could have done worse.'

'Ana, Ana - must people die each time we meet?'

'It seems so. That's why it would have been best if we had never met again.' She glanced at her sister. 'There were rumours that Zesi lived, that she had come to you.'

'Those treacherous slaves-'

'I think I would have known anyway. This whole scheme, how you worked your way into our world, into my head, with the stone and the labour, and then the slaves rising up against us - I knew it was too clever a plan for any Pretani. Even you, Shade.'

He grinned, and there was just a flash of the boyishness she remembered - the tender face she had longed to kiss, but never had. 'Still, it nearly worked, didn't it?'

'Why did you come back, Zesi? Why spill so much blood?'

'For the sake of the son you stole from me.' She reached out her arms towards Kirike and tried to smile. 'For you.' But she was grotesque, her hardened face smeared with the blood of dead men, more dried blood under her fingernails, and Kirike flinched back. Zesi turned on Ana. 'You took him from me.'

'He was not safe with you. None of us were safe, with you in the world.'

Zesi took another step forward, her fist closed on a b.l.o.o.d.y stabbing spear. 'Who are you? You are nothing. You are a worm beside me. All my life you got in the way. My father always favoured you-'

'That's foolish.'

'And then you took it on yourself to judge me, and to throw me out of my homeland-'

'If I had not you would have destroyed us all by now, as you killed the snailhead child under the reservoir you breached.'

'And for that, you exiled me! You said it must end here, Ana. Then let it be so.'

'I won't fight you.' Ana had a spear and a knife; she dropped them both.

Zesi grinned. 'If that's how you want it.' She raised her stabbing spear.

Kirike, baffled and distressed, called, 'What are you doing, Zesi - mother?'

'No,' Ana said sharply. 'Please, Kirike. Stay back-'

Zesi snarled, 'Don't stand in my way, boy.'

And Shade said, 'Enough is enough.'

His thrust was clean, the blade driving through Zesi's body from the back. For a moment more she stood, supported by the spear, an expression of outraged shock on her face.

Shade stood behind her, whispering in her ear. 'You destroyed my family. Even my mother went to her grave cursing me, because of you. You would even have killed our son, wouldn't you, to get to your sister? Now we face defeat. My men are being slaughtered. And was it for this, Zesi - your hurt pride, your hatred of your sister? I kill you, but you have killed me already.' And he thrust again. The blade punctured her heart and burst out of her ribs. She fell forward, into Ana's arms, blood spouting from her chest and mouth, already dead.

Kirike cried out, and fell on his father, but Shade easily brushed his clumsy blows aside. Then he held the boy, until he dissolved into weeping.

Shade looked over the boy's head at Ana. 'It had to be me that finished it,' he said blackly. 'Let my hands take the last of the blood, as they have the rest. I should never have come here, never have let her back into my life . . . Well. Let it end here.'

'I'm sorry,' Ana whispered, clinging to the body of her sister. 'Yes, let it end, Zesi. And if I couldn't honour you in life as you wanted, I will honour you in death.'

85.

Me roamed, looking for Leafy Boys. The cut leash still dangled from his neck. He was panting, bloodied but uninjured, deeply scared, lost.

In this strange place trees grew on salty land, and fires sprouted away from the hearths where the grounders usually kept them. The world was all broken down and jumbled up. He longed for the canopy, or failing that the security of the leash and the net. But the only grounders he found lay dead or dying.

Then he found another Leafy, alive. A girl. She was feeding on a dog, its belly ripped open by a spear. The smell of blood reminded him how hungry he was. He pushed the girl aside and shoved his face into the dog's open belly, and tore away a mouthful of meat. But he hadn't eaten all day, and something about the blood trickling down his throat worked in him, and his gut ached. He crouched, and let out an enormous fart, and then a bit of s.h.i.+t dribbled from his bare backside.

The girl stared at him. Then she laughed.

He laughed too. He felt better. Together they pushed their faces into the dog's belly.

The food made him feel better, and he thought more clearly. He remembered the way they had come, the way the grounders had driven them here. They had come from the south and climbed down into this bowl of land. Then that was the way they must return. Maybe they would find the grounders again. Better yet, they might find their way back to the forest canopy, the endless green.

He picked up the dog. The girl fought and snapped, until she saw he did not mean to take it from her. He slung it over his shoulder, still chewing its flesh. With the girl at his side he loped off to the west, across the salty land.

86.

The Thirty-Third Year After the Great Sea: Spring Equinox.

Following the slow rise of the land, the Pretani party walked out of the forest cover and into the glare of the spring sun. It was noon, the sun was as high in the southern sky as it would get all day, and the air was heavy and windless.

Acorn, twenty-five years old and proud in her hide tunic, led steadily and strongly, Kirike thought, as befitted his half-sister's rank as the Root of the Pretani. But the handful of warriors who followed her grumbled under their breaths about how thirsty they were and the state of their feet. Warriors always grumbled.

And Old Resin, who had seen thirty-six summers, hobbled into the light, muttering and squinting. 'Wretched sun . . . Give me the forest shade any day. If we'd been meant to stumble about in the light the tree G.o.ds wouldn't have blessed us with their shadow.'

Acorn said, 'Oh, stop complaining, old man.' She dug a battered cloth cap out of Resin's pack and set it on his bald, sunburned head. 'That's enough shade for you. Mind you, from now on it's open s.p.a.ces and sunlight all the way to Etxelur. What about you, Kirike? I suppose you're used to this.'

Kirike set down the bag he was carrying, turned his face up to the sun and stretched. 'But it's a long time since I made my home among you.' More than fifteen years, in fact, since he had come home with his father, Shade, to the woods of Albia. He was over thirty years old himself now. He breathed deep of the air, and he thought he detected a whiff of salt, that odd sharpness that he remembered vividly from his boyhood, so different from the damp, cloying smells of the forest. Suddenly his heavy, scratchy hide tunic felt uncomfortable, and he remembered how he had run with Dolphin Gift along the endless strands. 'I have Pretani blood, but Etxelur is in me too. Besides, even the strongest tree needs the sun.'

Resin hawked and spat. 'A nice Pretani saying for an Etxelur boy. Let me remind you of another. Saplings grow only when the great tree falls. And this old tree hasn't fallen yet. Is that bag of bones too heavy for you? If so pa.s.s it over, and let's get on.'

Kirike's sack, carried on a long shoulder strap, contained the bones of their father, Shade, dead a year now. They were making the long trek to Etxelur to fulfil his strange but firm wish that his bones should be placed in the land where the events that had shaped his whole life and the future of his people had occurred. 'No,' he said. 'My father's not heavy.' He hoisted the pack. 'Anyhow, I vaguely remember this route.'

Resin hobbled onward up the gra.s.sy slope, leaning heavily on a gnarled stick. 'So you should. This is the way we marched when we made war on Etxelur, all those years ago. And this is the place we decided to call Boundary Ridge, for it's as good as any a place to say that here Albia ends, and Northland begins . . .'